“How’s your folk fest?” people ask each other on the street. Nobody doesn’t know what you mean. Community is a word that gets thrown around a lot. It doesn’t bother me. Community means lots of things. They can be small or big, tight or loose, in person or digital, and live on a million other […]

Frontend Masters now has a Tutorials section of their site. Just makes your subscription all the more valuable, I suppose. I’ve got a couple videos on there now, based on a little component I was obsessed with for a minute. I re-created it my own way using an HTML Web Component and modern CSS fancy […]

I think I preferred talking about it to writing about it as really I just wanted to spout off thoughts and ideas, and hear other people’s. My writing wasn’t real journalism, it was more if it goes this way my guess is it ends badly. There are some real extremes here. At worst: Google is […]

We’ve long had a YouTube channel for ShopTalk, but now we’re posting regular ol’ episodes to it, which we’ve never done before. Like this: And “shorts” here and there that we’ll clip out of the shows when it’s fun.

When you open Visual Studio Code without doing something like opening a .workspace file or dragging a folder onto it, you get a fairly blank screen like this: RECORD SCRATCH. I’m an idiot. It was just like that because I had my “Work Bench” set to “none” instead of the default. Putting the value back […]

My kid likes listening to podcasts sometimes and it’s cool with me! Story Pirates, for example, rules. She must have typed in “Bluey” at some point into the podcast app we use and found the Bluey Storytime Podcast. It looks kind of official. That’s real Bluey art, it uses the word “Bluey” in the title, […]

You’ve got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade. So we’re going to force you sell your car. What’s with the weird redirect? If the monopoly is directly caused by paying the grocery stores for placement, then stop that part. We can see this exact redirect […]

The ShopTalk Discord #games channel has been pretty heavy on Balatro for like… a year? I was turned off by the game at first as I think I downloaded some unofficial port or something and it was unplayably janky. But now Balatro+ is on Apple Arcade, which I have anyway, and I’ve got a perfectly […]

Imagine announcing to the world you’re going to do the difficult job of making big changes and cuts in the government in order to make it more efficient. Then taking an organization that is demonstrably doing that job well already and destroying the whole thing. What if I told you there was a group of […]

My sister is a big fan of Justin Timberlake. She & her friends went to go see him in Milwaukee this past weekend, with some swank front-row tickets her husband Aaron scored. She made a little sign to hold up that said “Moms / Teachers Night Out” and JT called them out early in the […]

I like the John Warner thing where the problem with outsourcing writing to AI is that the computers aren’t doing a process that is aligned with how humans would do it. On an episode of Search Engine, he said that using a calculator for long division, a tool that some compare to AI generated writing, […]

Seventeen bits of advice from Ariel Salminen on Leading Successful Product Teams. I really like all of them. Allow me to pluck off a few about meetings: People gotta work yo. Including yourself. You gotta give lots of time to let that happen. Context switching has a cost for some people, and I’ve found a […]